Mailbag: Didn’t Tony Bennett only have two years left on his contract in 2019?

You have to remember, Tony signed his extensions in June 2014 & Sept 2019. We are not even in June yet and Tony had two years left on his contract the year we won it all in 2019. I also believe there is no doubt questions about his contract came up during the recruitment of Power and Ames and they liked what they heard. Now if Tony doesn’t have an extension by the start of practice, he is likely done coaching in two years and recruiting is going to take a hit for sure.

SoCalWahoo

I don’t usually do this, but I saw this comment from a poster on the message board of The Sabre, and because folks there love to go off on me because I supposedly engage in “speculation,” I have to address this.

SoCalWahoo doesn’t have the basic facts here, which isn’t surprising, given the nature of what you can expect from experts who spend their days posting on a message board with no pushback on their sourcing.

SoCalWahoo, for instance, has a 25K POSTS badge with his name on that site.

I guess this makes him an authority.

Sorry, SoCal – fact is, Tony Bennett didn’t sign an extension in June 2014, but rather, on May 1, 2015.

That extension bound Bennett to UVA through April 30, 2021, with an additional year automatically added on May 1, 2016, May 1, 2017, and May 1, 2018.

What that means, in effect, is that as of May 1, 2018, that 2015 contract was to run through April 30, 2024.

An amendment to the 2015 contract, signed in 2017, added one more automatic extension year to the end of the deal, with the effective date of that addition being May 1, 2019, so that the contract would at that point, to be clear, as of May 1, 2019, run through April 30, 2025.

A second amendment to the 2015 deal, then, which was signed in 2019, formally set the end of the contract at April 30, 2025, catching up to where things were with the automatic extensions, with an additional year automatically added on May 1, 2020, which is how we get now that Bennett is under contract through April 30, 2026, basically, the end of the 2025-2026 basketball season.

What this means: the assertion by SoCalWahoo that “Tony had two years left on his contract the year we won it all in 2019” is … just wrong.

Bennett, as of May 1, 2018, thus went into the 2018-2019 season bound contractually to UVA through April 30, 2025.

He didn’t have “two years left on his contract the year we won it all in 2019.”

He had … seven (2018-2019 through 2024-2025).

People who comment on that message board love to take shots at me.

What I’ll say here is, if you’re going to take a shot, at the least, have your basic f–king facts right.